Pregnant women often rely on two identities—a pregnant self and a non-pregnant self—to help them navigate the profound psychological and physiological effects that pregnancy has on their body image, according to a Penn ...

A bipartisan agreement reached by House and Senate negotiators would set new safety standards for asbestos and other dangerous chemicals, including tens of thousands that have gone unregulated for decades.

The Dutch government has ordered 15 million iodine pills to protect people living near nuclear plants in case of an accident, officials said Friday, as concerns rise over ageing reactors across the border in Belgium.

Researchers from Ghent University succeeded in stabilizing folates in biofortified rice in order to prevent their degradation upon long term storage. They used two strategies: by linking folates with folate binding proteins ...

In an era where popular culture is increasingly recognized for its impact on lay understanding of health and medicine, few scholars have looked at television's powerful role in the creation of patient expectations, especially ...

Lifestyle factors including breastfeeding and diet may impact on expecting mothers' exposure to persistent toxic substances (PTS) including metals commonly found in electronic devices, according to a study into environmental ...

A psychology study from The University of Texas at Austin sheds new light on today's standards of beauty, attributing modern men's preferences for women with a curvy backside to prehistoric influences.

The font type of written text and how easy it is to read can be influential when it comes to engaging people with important health information and recruiting them for potentially beneficial programmes, new research by The ...

A chemical accident at a factory in Spain on Thursday injured three people and cloaked large swathes of the region in an orange chemical cloud, forcing over 60,000 people to stay indoors before it disappeared.

Pregnancy

Pregnancy (latin graviditas) is the carrying of one or more offspring, known as a fetus or embryo, inside the uterus of a female. In a pregnancy, there can be multiple gestations, as in the case of twins or triplets. Human pregnancy is the most studied of all mammalian pregnancies. Obstetrics is the surgical field that studies and cares for high risk pregnancy. Midwifery is the non-surgical field that cares for pregnancy and pregnant women.

Childbirth usually occurs about 38 weeks after conception; i.e., approximately 40 weeks from the last normal menstrual period (LNMP) in humans. The World Health Organization defines normal term for delivery as between 37 weeks and 42 weeks. The calculation of this date involves the assumption of a regular 28-day period.